My Momma's Chicken Salad - A True Southern Wedding Shower Favorite!

It seems that we never really make things as good as our moms.  For years I've tried my best to perfect my chicken salad recipe.  I've added different spices and added nuts, but never quite perfected my chicken salad until yesterday.  Being last minute on almost everything I do in and out of the kitchen, yesterday was no exception.

My Momma's Chicken Salad - Click here for the recipe

In the South, we love our wedding showers.  It is traditional to have certain appetizers to help celebrate the bride to be with.  Yesterday we got to honor one of my oldest friends sweet daughter Leslie Hodges on her upcoming wedding with a bridal shower.  She will be a beautiful bride here very soon and her aunt Camila, her family, along with her mom's and dad's friends came together to shower her with gifts for her home with her new husband.

I will always remember Leslie and her sweet sisters in their pajamas at our house after Friday night football games.  All our young friends would gather at our little house in town after home football games to visit and the kids would play and then pass out all over our girls bedrooms.  We've been friends with her parents for a lifetime and love them and their families very much.  Scott made them a part of our lives many years ago on our very first date and their 'Indian Rock' community connection from church, to classmates, to dear friends goes back a long way.  To sum it all up, it's very special to celebrate sweet friends kids whenever you can.

Leslie and her sweet mom Cindy

Leslie and her sisters Lauren, Lacy and mom Cindy

Hostesses for Leslie's wedding shower full of aunts and friends

Leslie with her mom and dear grandmothers

Leslie with friend Anna Jo and daughter Kayla

Leslie and Patti, her sweet stepmother

Cindy and sister Camila

Leslie and best friend Cassie

It is tradition to serve dainty foods and not a full meal at a southern wedding shower.  In our little town a favorite party food is always petite fours that are little white cakes with a delicate white icing on top.  You simply can never get enough of these and everyone loves them.  Along with those little cakes, you will always find these days beautifully decorated sugar cookies in beautiful bridal designs, fruits and cheese trays, seasoned and spiced nuts, sausage balls and little pinwheel sandwiches that in our part of the south are made with tortillas.  My job was to make chicken salad to serve with crackers for Leslie's shower and instead of store bought, I chose to make it from scratch last minute.

Stunning cookies

Loved these sweet and modern napkins

A pretty southern wedding shower table full of finger foods

Literally as I drove to the store, I called my mom and asked her to snap a picture of her handwritten recipe and send it to me.  You'll see her recipe note below.

My mom's beautiful handwriting.  You can tell it's a teacher's penmanship!

I know one day I hope very far in the future, that these recipe notes will all be handed down to me.  On this day, I was thankful for the technology of telephone photography and the ease in which I was able to get a copy of the recipe instead of having it recited to me last minute.

My Momma's Chicken Salad in my pretty crystal bowl with matching platter.
Click here for the recipe for My Momma's Chicken Salad recipe.

Using store bought rotisserie chicken, I deboned the meat and cut it all into small bite sized portions.  Fresh celery, green grapes, long, green onions (green tops as well), and fresh squeezed lemon were added to make My Momma's Chicken Salad the best I've honestly ever had.  The things that I believe took this chicken salad over the top were the pineapple and sour cream along with the Real Mayonnaise that we mixed in with plenty of salt and black pepper.  If you are not a fan of black pepper, you can hold off on it, but I love, love it in abundance and especially with this chicken salad.

My youngest daughter Audrey was a huge help slicing the grapes with my newest, favorite cherry tomato slicer and helped me mix it all together while making sure I was following my mom's recipe exactly as it was written.

Audrey and I doubled the recipe using two rotisserie chickens so that we could have some for lunch the next day and for the week ahead.  My Momma's Chicken Salad was seriously a huge hit at the shower and from the 8 cups I took, literally only 1 cup was left.  I promised to place the recipe on my blog and recipe site today, so that we could share with all those who asked for it.

As always a special thanks to my sweet mom who inspires me more than she knows with her cooking, her tried and true recipes and love for us all.  She is one of my biggest cheerleaders ever and along with so many of her and my Granny's recipes, her chicken salad will forever be on my shower menus from now on.

So whether it's a wedding shower, birthday party, or you just want a wonderful chicken salad to serve with crackers or between to pieces of bread as a sandwich, try My Momma's Chicken Salad  recipe.  In a pinch, store bought can be a great substitute, however from start to finish Audrey and I had My Momma's Chicken Salad Recipe recipe done in under 30 minutes and in a pretty crystal bowl ready to go.  Sometimes last minute recipes are the best recipes!

Enjoy and let me know if you like it please.

Alise 
The Ranch Kitchen    

The Ranch Kitchen's Cherry Limeade Sherbet Punch

In the south wedding showers are done many different ways. The end result is 'showering' the bride with gifts for her home with her chosen groom.  The hostess sends out invitations, women offer to assist by either donating money toward the catering or are assigned appetizers and/or desserts to bring.  Ladies clean their houses until they shine and hostesses arrive an hour before to help with last minute preparations.

In my small town. many showers have the gifts already laid out throughout the house on tables with the cards beside each gift signifying whom they came from.  Some showers will not only have gifts laid out, but gifts guest have brought wrapped to open during the shower.  Registries are set up in our local gifts shops and it is always as easy as picking up the phone and calling in your order without a credit card!  You're billed later by mail or know to go in before and pay what's due.  Some registries in recent years are made at chain department stores like Dillards or Macy's and guest can register online to have them picked up by the bride and either brought the day before to be set up at her shower or kept at home.  In my little hometown the local gift shops bring out the gifts either the day or morning before and the main hostess where the shower is held will set all the gifts out on top of her best linen tablecloths. 

Although a lot of work is involved, I love giving showers of any kind. For one, my house gets that good, 'somebodies coming' cleaning that it normally would not get, and two my favorite foods are party foods as evident by my Pinterest Board called Party Time! Women can always make a meal out of appetizers and after eating a few petite fours (little white cakes with delicious powdered sugar icing) one of the sweetest desserts of the south... you are pretty much done for the day calorie wise!

My most recent shower was not held at my house, but at the beautiful friend of Lisa Pitman Rogers. She and her sister Donna had decorated a lovely table with a to die for crystal footed punch bowl of their mother's and assigned each hostess wonderful foods to bring.  The shower was for my long time friends Pam Clemens son Mitch and daughter-in-law to be Courtney. 

Didn't they make the prettiest table.
Pictured is my sweet diabetic mom having some nondiabetic punch and sweets.
Love that woman! 

My contribution was my sherbet punch that I have been making for the last twenty or more years for showers, receptions and birthday parties.  I call it my Anthology Punch from the days when I hosted our district presentation of student written work for grades kindergarten through the twelfth grades.  Each student produces in class a poem or narrative that was then judged and selected to be placed in a bound book showcasing the best in our district of over 2,500 students.  Several hundred attended this function and we could have never pulled it off without the help of my teacher friends and sherbet punch that became a staple and favorite of the staff and those in attendance. 

Any combination of punches will work for this punch and I have been known to add diced frozen fruit to it when I wanted to add a little flavor.  Keep the sherbet frozen and it is best to have your 7 Up, Sprite or Ginger Ale chilled in order to not melt the punch too quickly.

I should call this 'husband punch', because my husband actually bought the sherbet for me at the grocery store in Cherry Limeade flavor when they were out of my standard pineapple that we normally use.  It turned out to be the best sherbet punch I have ever made and thankfully had I served it with the pineapple, one lady said she would have been allergic to it.  It had a beautiful pink color with pops of red from the cherry's. 

For this shower, with just at fifty in attendance, we served three gallons of sherbet with four - 1 liter bottle of 7 Up.  I usually use a one to one ratio and sometimes 1 gallon of sherbet to 1 - 1/2 bottles of 7 Up.  Ginger Ale and Sprite, or your grocery store's version of these sodas (off brands) are just as good and cheaper as well.

Cherry Limeade Sherbet Punch

1 gallon Cherry Limeade Sherbet

1  to 1 1/2 liters bottle of 7 Up soda

Place sherbet in a large punch bowl.  Gently pour soda(s) over the sherbet over the ladle first being careful not to splash it out.

With a separate large spoon, gently break up the sherbet into small pieces like what you would want served in punch cups. 

Serve and enjoy! 

***As easy as this punch is, I can't tell you how many times people have asked for the recipe.  Be creative and use sherbet or even ice creams you enjoy the most.  It's always a hit and this recipe for the Cherry Limeade Sherbet Punch was my biggest hit yet with very little left over.  *** You can find Cherry Limeade Sherbet on the ice cream isle by Golden Brook at Brookshire's Grocery Company or you can also find it at Braum's Restaurants and Grocery at their ice cream counter!

Enjoy,

Alise